Last Updated on July 2, 2026
A Visceral First Revival of Deborah Warner’s Peter Grimes
5.0 out of 5.0 stars
It’s always unnerving seeing a revival of a production you have loved. Will the singers be on form? Will that initial impact be reinforced or fade away to a lesser experience? Will new cast members and the conductor bring a fresh energy to the production or create a less focused experience? I needn’t have been concerned. This show, the first revival of Deborah Warner’s Peter Grimes, with new Music Director Jakub Hrůša now firmly at the helm, delivers on all fronts, with the conductor unleashing the storm-like power of Britten’s score and the combined vocal and instrumental forces at his disposal to stunning effect.
Peter Grimes, with a libretto by Montagu Slater, was first performed in 1945 at Sadler’s Wells. Conducted by Reginald Goodall, it was Britten’s first opera and his first major international success. In three acts, the work is based on George Crabbe’s narrative poem ‘Peter Grimes’, taken from his book of 1810 ‘The Borough’. The Borough is the name of a fictional village where the opera’s action takes place and clearly references Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, where both Crabbe, Britten and his lover, the great tenor Peter Pears, who debuted the part, lived.
The central theme of Peter Grimes deals with the persecution of an individual by a larger group. Grimes has been accused of causing the death of his young apprentice at sea through his violent and neglectful behaviour. He is a tragic anti-hero brought down by his stubborn pride and belief that if he can become rich, the people of the Borough will give him the respect he craves. Benjamin Britten would have understood this dynamic all too keenly as both a gay man and a pacifist, and the character of Peter Grimes fits into the ‘tortured male’ hero trope that Britten features in many of his works.
I first saw Peter Grimes in the 1991 English National Opera production with Philip Langridge playing the title role. If Langridge was the heir to Peter Pears, then he has passed the torch to Allan Clayton, the British tenor who plays the title role, coaching him in the part in what has now become an era-defining interpretation of the role.
Deborah Warner’s approach is subtle, allowing the powerful dynamics between the crowd, the sea, the lead characters and of course the music to take the foreground. The singers are dressed in jeans, t-shirts, winter sweaters and oiled jackets. Michael Levine’s simple but effective set design uses the width of the ROH stage to great effect with a neutral white clapboard backdrop morphing into a seascape, seawall, seafront and pub interior. Warner has taken influence from the run-down seaside towns of England’s south coast, in particular Jaywick Sands in Essex. We see echoes of right-wing nationalism with a Union Jack, hard tattooed bodies, bovver boots and skinhead crops. This is not the Suffolk coast as a bouji weekend bolthole. It’s a much more brutal space with a populace locked into a subsistence-level economic interdependence, held together by the restraining power of the Church and the constant threat of being ostracised.
This production of Peter Grimes features a stellar cast with fabulous support from established stars returning from its first London outing, including Bryn Terfel, Maria Bengtsson and former Jette Parker Young Artist Jacques Imbrailo. But it is Allan Clayton’s performance as Peter Grimes that is worth the price of admission on its own. He brings a terrifying sense of dramatic realism to the part, embodying the desperation and damaged emotional landscape of the character that mirrors the destructive power of the sea. It’s a reading of the part rooted in contemporary conceptions of mental illness, such as PTSD, and in Grimes’ dreams and fantasies, he and we see the dead apprentice floating across the stage as a recurring visual reminder of the character’s inevitable fate.
Clayton is masculine and passionate with a shambling strength and physicality that simultaneously conveys threat and vulnerability. His voice has a luminous intensity combined with a flawless technique that shines in the exposed high notes. The articulation is less plummy than that of Pears, even as when singing ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’, surely one of the most intensely ‘religious’ passages of secular music ever written. Framed in a triangle of white light, the character is reaching out to a spiritual destiny far beyond the confines of The Borough. Clayton has established himself as the leading Grimes on the international circuit, and his performance in this revival embodies that self-confidence; he is both utterly lost and supremely self-confident in the role.
Although he sings ‘I’m native rooted here’, Grimes is the eternal outsider, pitting himself against the dual challenges of the sea and the people. The Royal Opera Chorus represent Grimes’ nemesis as the townsfolk of The Borough and delivers some spine-chillingly thrilling choral work. They shift from polyphonic shanty shouts to unison accusations, sometimes moving as one like a shoal of fish preoccupied with vengeance. It was good to see their director, William Spaulding, taking a deserved bow at the curtain call.
Similarly brilliant were the orchestra. Making a shift from the precision and clarity of Mark Elder, who conducted the original production, to Jakub Hrůša’s more elemental reading, the band was complicit in creating a thrilling sonic barrage that blew the audience away. The opera’s acts are linked by a series of orchestral Interludes which exist in a concert version as the Four Sea Interludes. With high strings and wind syncopations, low brass clusters, bleak and threatening major minor dissonance, polytonal arpeggios, semitonal squeals and visceral squalls of sound, has any composer written more thrillingly of the sea?
Swedish soprano Maria Bengtsson plays Ellen Orford, Grimes’ romantic foil, eaten up by her internalised passion. She takes us on a journey from hope to despair as she tries to soothe Peter’s desperation. A couple of years on, Bengtsson has shed some of her cool Scandi-noir detective look and is more convincing as an impoverished East Anglian schoolteacher. Despite Bengtsson’s naturally lyrical approach, there is now more intensity when she sings the pivotal aria ‘Let her among you without fault cast the first stone’ and the famous ‘Embroidery’ aria, in which she mourns the loss of Grimes’ second apprentice is laced through threads of a deeper emotional understanding of the role.
In a commanding performance as the retired Captain Balstrode, the one male character to show any sympathy for the doomed protagonist, Bryn Terfel’s bass-baritone voice has the power, presence, and acting chops to serve as both advocate for Grimes and the person who seals his fate. Terfel’s character is a brutal realist, accepting of the status quo with all its inequities and abuse, and his reading of the role is both masterful and nuanced.
Bass Clive Bayley creates a characterful Swallow, the town’s seedy mayor and presiding magistrate, in a performance that strikes a balance between the needs of justice and the unity of the town.
Baritone Jacques Imbrailo, who took the part of Billy Budd in Warner’s production, takes playful advantage of the role of town apothecary Ned Keene, delivered as a hyper, track-suited wide boy taking advantage of great British mezzo-soprano Christine Rice’s Mrs Sedley, a laudanum-addicted refugee from the Thursday Night Murder Club and town snooper.
Fellow mezzo-soprano Catherine Wyn-Rogers plays the publican Auntie with stoic charm, setting out her stall as the community’s provider of comfort and shelter in the sublime quartet ‘From the gutter’, sung with her pleasingly trashy nieces (Jennifer France and Spanish soprano Natalia Labourdette in denim miniskirts) and Ellen, as all four women articulate their position in this brutal patriarchy.
Special mention should go to tenor John Graham-Hall, who plays the fanatical Methodist Bob Boles with a wonderful sense of comic desperation, and I particularly enjoyed the clarion tone of tenor James Gilchrist’s Rev. Horace Adams, the town’s pastor.
This is a Peter Grimes for our times, centred on a flawed, self-destructive hero, undone by the power of the collective coalescing with the irresistible power of the sea. This production has surely reached its peak in this season and, with the Royal Opera House at the top of its game, is worth every penny of the taxpayers’ subsidy. You should go.
5–28 May 2026
Royal Opera House, Bow Street, London, WC2E 9DD
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